Crypto Cooldown Forces Steemit to Lay off 70% of Employees

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Steemit, a decentralized sharing system and distributed app designed to rewards content creators with crypto, will be laying off a massive chunk of its staff.

The company announced that it is cutting off 70% of its workforce, citing “the weakness of the cryptocurrency market, the fiat returns on our automated selling of STEEM diminishing, and the growing costs of running full Steem nodes.”

The team members who are remaining will shift their focus to reducing the costs of running and operating their servers by reducing the size of the Steemit blockchain, to also bring a reduction to their level of dependence on the Amazon AWS

In the press release, Ned Scott, founder, and CEO of Steemit, wrote:

“We still believe that Steem can be by far the best, and lowest cost, blockchain protocol for applications and that the improvements that will result from this new direction will make it far better for application sustainability. However, to ensure that we can continue to improve Steem, we need to first get costs under control to remain economically sustainable.”

Founded in March 2016, Steemit.com was one of the first decentralized applications to be launched, and it allowed users of the platform to submit content and get paid for their work. The Steemit coin (STEEM), which was started by the platform as a payment method, has also been hit hard, losing about 96% of its value since hitting an all-time high. It currently trades at $0.37, per CCN Price Index.

The idea of decentralized apps has been affected by the current volatile state of the crypto market, and Steem is just the attest of decentralized apps to be feeling the brunt of this bear market.

Another app which has been affected a great deal is Civil, a decentralized app which promised to pay journalists for the work they do. A wide array of companies developed payment programs for their writers based on the Civil platform. However, considering the fall of the cryptocurrency market, these organizations have been forced to pull back their endorsements.

Featured image from Shutterstock.

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